SWEETBRIER-ON-THE-SCHUYLKILL,
PHILADELPHIA
THE HOME OF THE FATHER OF THE FREE SCHOOLS
OF PENNSYLVANIA
When Samuel Breck was fifty-eight years and six months old—on January 17, 1830—he wrote:
"My residence has been ... for more than thirty years ... on an estate belonging to me, situated on the right bank of the Schuylkill, in the township of Blockley, county of Philadelphia, and two miles from the western part of the city. The mansion on this estate I built in 1797. It is a fine stone house, rough cast, fifty-three feet long, thirty-eight broad, and three stories high, having out-buildings of every kind suitable for elegance and comfort. The prospect consists of the river, animated by its great trade, carried on in boats of about thirty tons, drawn by horses; of a beautiful sloping lawn, terminating at that river, now nearly four hundred yards wide opposite the portico; of side-screen woods; of gardens, green-house, etc. Sweetbrier is the name of my villa."
Mr. Breck spent his boyhood in Boston, but his parents removed to Philadelphia in 1792 to escape what they felt was an unjust system of taxation. During the first years of their residence in the city of William Penn it had "a large society of elegant and fashionable and stylish people," Mr. Breck said in his diary. "Congress held its sessions in Philadelphia until the year 1800, and gave to the city the style and tone of a capital. All the distinguished emigrants from France took up their abode there."
Among the associates of the Brecks were some of the leaders of the new nation. Samuel Breck was frequently at the Robert Morris house, and later, during the four years' imprisonment of Mr. Morris, he "visited that great man in the Prune Street debtors' apartment, and saw him in his ugly whitewashed vault."
The diarist's comment was bitter: "In Rome or Greece a thousand statesmen would have honored his mighty services. In a monarchy ... he would have been appropriately pensioned; in America, Republican America, not a single voice was raised in Congress or elsewhere in aid of him or his family."
There is not a more striking passage in the diaries than that written on August 27, 1814, during the second war with England:
"I was in town to-day ... at half past twelve o'clock I went with an immense crowd to the post-office to hear the news from the South. The postmaster read it to us from a chamber window. It imported that the navy-yard had been burnt (valued at from six to eight millions of dollars) including the new frigate Essex, sloop-of-war Argus, some old frigates, a vast quantity of timber, from five to eight hundred large guns, and many manufactories of cordage, etc., by our people; that the President's House, Capitol, and other important buildings had been destroyed, and all this by a handful of men, say, six thousand!"